How looking down almost killed Goldeneye speedrunning - Videos for the 97.4%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKkhzioZVD0 Ignore the clickbait thumbnail

the very essence of optimizing fun out of a game

I'm glad that Karl has stepped in to put out great speedrunning videos in the light of Goose being a dickhead

Just goes to show that at the end of the day speedrunning is just as much about enjoyment as it is about being objectively fastest, possibly so much so that plenty of routes in the speedran games may have been chosen unintentionally because they were fun rather than them being objectively the fastest.

The fastest speedrun route for Prey was found very quickly after the game released. It took between 8 and 9 minutes to beat the game. No one does that route any more because it involves 5 minutes of falling through map geometry with no player inputs and required fairly precise positioning. So it was a boring speedrun that could fail half way through because you were slightly off position.

Yeah, hence why it's also important to have categories such as glitchless because at some point too many glitches no longer makes it fun and just makes it a chore.

Goose is quite literally a neo-nazi. I don't just mean "He's racist" but I mean he had a private discord in which it leaked that he fully supports widespread genocide.

That is immensely disappointing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLHBGigq4zk His follow up video about the same guy is pretty cool too A whole segment of the community using a secret technique and not talking about it for various reasons, then this middle aged dude who just wants everyone to do their best publicly exposes it so everyone in the community not aware of it can better their times What a legend of a man

Those responses are the most hilariously pathetic thing. You bug and glitch your way to faster times but looking down is just this shameful playing method that ruins it? Fuck off.

Depends on which game's community. Some are incredibly welcoming and supportive, others are elitist overly competitive pricks.

And even within communities, you don't always have hiveminds. I remember when Rwhitegoose released his video calling potentially being able to speedrun Goldeneye on a "N64 Mini" in the future disgusting and degeneracy and anything other than the original hardware is bad and wrong, the comments were basically full of people telling him to shut the fuck up and there's nothing wrong with it as long as the leaderboards are separate.

How'd you miss the whole point of the video? It wasn't "wow this method is disgraceful", it's that it made the game extremely unfun to play for a minor yet unbeatable advantage so people bailed. I could go on but I'd just be repeating the points of the video: people quit because they realised that the methods they enjoyed were objectively inferior to one that was unfun to play and there was no way to bridge the gap in a competitive environment, and it couldn't be mitigated by going to another category. So they gave up. There are entire categories in certain games that don't use particular glitches

If, theoretically, you were speedrunning a game, and someone came up with a strat for a category you were running that just kind of took the fun out of it, would you persist in it anyway?

I guess I'm not up to date but from my perspective of just watching his videos Goose seems pretty alright. His latest video on 1080 was fantastic imo

Well of course he doesn't bring it into his videos, but it doesn't change the fact that he's genuinely a terrible person.

I never saw the appeal in speedrunning games/levels that are so quick to finish that a 1 second off the clock is the best you can expect for a new world record At that point you're just repeating the same pattern over and over until the stars align and you just get it without really knowing why

Unrelated, but... I can't help but notice this: Why are N64 Speedruns almost always done on Japanese versions? I mean I assume it makes sense for stuff like Mario 64 and OoT since those would be versions that didn't have bugs patched during Localization, but GoldenEye and Perfect Dark were western games, so I don't see how that logic applies.

In some games, text scrolls at different speeds in different localizations.

https://forums.the-elite.net/index.php?topic=21748.msg444293#msg444293 Short version: Japanese versions have faster firing for the AR33 and Watch Laser, more auto-aim than US or PAL and additional body armour pickups.

Easy modo?!

According to devs, Japanese gamers are just plain bad at games involving shooting and need all the help they can get. There's other examples too, like Japan's "Normal" difficulty in MGS being labelled "Easy" in the west.

I may be inaccurate, but I believe that a large amount of Japanese devs felt that American and Japanese players had different preferences in gameplay, where they felt that Americans desired challenges more often and Japanese players were more interested in the endpoint instead of the road to get there. This resulted in a large amount of games being made easier so they'd be less frustrating for those that prefer games as interactive stories.

Obviously, my opinion doesn't mean jack shit because I don't find speedrunning that appealing (notably glitching runs and especially tool-assisted runs), but when he went through all of that and the reactions, all I could think of was "So what?" Like, I'm sorry, but my response would be to just ignore the downlookers'' times. I honestly don't understand why they couldn't have made downlooking its own subcategory. It's pretty obvious that someone's just downlooking when you watch them play and they're literally just looking at the floor. In the event someone argues "how do you verify that they didn't downlook?" I counter, with the legitimately serious question, of "how do you verify any times, period?" It's trivially easy for someone to post a time on a forum. And even not that hard to edit screenshots or hack memory to display times. Anything short of video evidence can't be verified, and so I assume that's what competitive speedrunners use to verify times. And then that video evidence would clearly show the person downlooking. I'm legitimately confused as to why this was an issue at all. I get the "this better method isn't fun" argument, but only insofar as "and so I won't use it and I will ignore the times of people who do." Literally quitting an event you love because someone found a dumb way to do it better seems extremely overreactive to me, from an outsiders' perspective. Can someone please explain to me why this was such a big deal, that couldn't be rectified with just "use video evidence for times and ignore the downlookers"?

meanwhile the rental industry we grew up with basically didn't exist in Japan (copyright stuff or something like that basically made it illegal to a degree), so in the localization process a number of developers took it upon themselves to make the US versions of games harder so that us snot-nosed kids and curious teenagers wouldn't beat Castlevania 3 in a weekend and return it with no more profit made off the game. and in the Japanese perspective, they also had cases of thinking we're too dumb for certain games, which is why Final Fantasy Mystic Quest came to the US over Final Fantasy V (though that was in-part also inspired by sales numbers of JRPGs not popping in the US like they were in Japan).. there was a lot of goofiness and lack of communication overseas when it came to this stuff, really in terms of speedrunning, the japanese text can compress more words into a sentence than english can, so for games with manually scrolling text, you can get through it a lot faster unless a game has a weird design quirk involved. this is especially helpful for mario speedruns, but also for RPG runners. some games do difficulty differences for different audiences, but most of the time it really is just that simple.

Speedrunning is mostly about personal achievement and fun competition. Things like this remove the fun by imposing an overwhelmingly annoying restriction on an entire run.

If it's just about personal achievement, then those responses just seem even more overreactionary to me. Like, I play games for my own personal enjoyment and sense of achievement, to an extreme degree. I literally don't give a shit how well anyone else does - all I care about is being proud about my own personal achievements. I straight-up ignore leaderboards in games that have them, like the Daily Runs in Slay the Spire. I literally couldn't care less. The way I see it, you can either have competition, or personal achievement. I just don't see how you can have both, because to me, they are fundamentally at odds with each other. So, I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree. It's not easy to understand at all for me.

It drags the whole scene from "fun competition" to "unfun competition" It's like you're trying to be difficult here.

I apologize if it's coming across that way, because I'm not. I just genuinely don't see it that way. This'll be my last post in this thread. Like I said when I first came in, I don't see the appeal in speedrunning to begin with, and as such my opinion on the matter means fuck all. I found the description of the glitch itself interesting (in the sense of facepalming whenever I hear about old games tying important game logic like run-speed to framerate), but the reaction to it seemed disproportionate to my outsider view. And so I just felt like sharing my thoughts on the matter. I did just that, and it's clear to me that I just have a fundamental failure to understand the appeal like the enthusiasts here do. I'm not the brightest shovel on the tree, but even I can tell when I'm in an area I don't belong. I'll stop cluttering the thread with my failure to understand. I appreciate you taking the time to try and explain it. Means a lot to me, even if in the end I still don't quite get it. Tis the thought that counts.

Wait, is that the Goose that had a minecraft server on FP?